So…it was our first “official” day of being unofficial, and on the whole it felt really good. Despite today being a public holiday, we decided it might be a good idea to have our first school day today – 1. because it is the beginning of a week, and being a conventional-type gal I like to start things at the beginning and 2. because DrDaddy was at home today and so theoretically would be able to keep MissySprout and TeppyBoy entertained while we attempted to knuckle down. However DrDaddy was not as much help as we had hoped as he (together with Grandpa) was replacing our old steel windows with new wooden ones.
We thus were forced to move school to the back of the house – the “outdoor” classroom. I say “forced” but to be honest, we would have done most of our work out there anyway – the weather was fine, the sun was shining – why would we want to be cooped inside anyway?
Our little time-table seems to be fairly OK – we were a little short on time for reading/writing/narration but a lot of that was due to me not quite getting the required juggling co-ordinated enough. I have a new strategy in mind which we’ll try tomorrow and see how it goes.
We started on french knitting for handwork – both seemed to cope fine with it, and LadyLol has already made a 10cm rope. ProfBiggs is slightly less enthusiastic and a little slower, but I noticed with LadyLol that once her knitting started showing at the bottom of her knitting dolly her motivation improved dramatically. It remains to be seen if the same effect will be observed in her brother. Also on the timetable today was physics and chem. Today we started looking at matter and at the states of matter. This involved 2 experiments: one where we attempted to turn water vapour in the air into solid gas. It worked like a charm! The other involved wetting two cloths, hanging them out in defferent places (one in the sun, one in the house) and revisiting them both at intevals to observe how long the took to dry respectively. This gave me a good chance to discuss the scientific method with them – I was pleased to be able to get that in in lesson 1! So far I am really happy with the books I have chosen for this subject – not dumbed-down, LOTS of visuals, but clear enough and logical enough that we can follow them easily. I am also ECSTATIC with MEP Maths. The kids loved it today.
As for the other two…MissySprout decided like “school” looked like much to much fun to be left out of, so she fetched a colouring book and came and sat on the deck with us and coloured in. TeppityBoy found a bubble mixture container and wandered around blowing bubbles for himself and everyone else very happily – so that wasn’t so hard either!
…and we have 5 new wooden windows… They look so lovely – I can’t wait until all the rest of the windows have been converted now!
ZooMomma
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